


forget stardust; (you are iron)

by typervoxilations



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 00:44:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7553644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typervoxilations/pseuds/typervoxilations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i. <i>Stop. Assess the situation. Think about the consequences.</i><br/>ii. <i>Breathe deep, even if it’s crippling pain, sway on unsteady feet.</i><br/>iii. <i>Choose.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	forget stardust; (you are iron)

**Author's Note:**

> Earthborn, war hero, Ash died; can be read as paragon-control ending if you squint. Open-ended relationship setting, feel free to self insert your preferred LI for fem!shep all you want, which is why they're all tagged. (Actually, it’s probably because I love all Mass Effect LI and I can’t choose between them. Yeah, yeah, guys, hate on Alenko all you want, he’s not the worst LI and he still has a sexy voice, damn you Raphael Sbarge.)
> 
> In other news, my girlfriend got me into Mass Effect and I didn’t realize I had enough soul left to be hurt more. I fucking love Shepard. Bioware got their games right. Mostly. I will probably never forgive them for not including Thane as a viable option in Genesis 2.
> 
> Unbeta'd and all mistakes are my own.

“ Please god,

Be kind to me.

This skin is tainted

By wasted days,

This youth is stolen

By aching bones.

Please god,

I am too young

To have these scars. ”

 

 _PLEASE GOD_ , [ **L.G.** ](http://gayenjolres.tumblr.com/)

 

* * *

 

      They call her a hero but she remembers the frozen, hard nights on Earth as an orphan - stealing enough for her next meal, for her sisters in all but blood.

 

      (Bailey tells her about the duct rats in a tone of voice that tells her he knows nothing of the little ones who have no other choice. She bites her tongue and doesn’t think about watching another orphan her age die of starvation on the streets, little girls that one day didn’t show up again and little boys who did with new bruises bleeding the color of purple-blue-pale galaxies on their skin. She stared until she burned them into her memory and squeezed her eyes shut to imagine herself among the stars, anywhere but here. _Drala’fa,_ the unnoticed. Unwanted, until someone found a way to use them for their own selfish gains.

 

 _You used children?_ She had demanded-accused and Thane, at least, had looked contrite about it - but she understood more than she let on. Better to be used than forgotten.)

 

      They praise her stand against the Blitz and she remembers being twenty two years old and gripping the hands of a much older man bleeding out from the stump that had been his leg until the light faded from his eyes and thinking, _this could have been me._ Detached. Disbelieving. It's harder to imagine with high pitched whines from heat-sink-discharge and explosions all around her. It's easier later, in the silence of safety, where everything pushes past the adrenaline and survival instinct to haunt her. They tell stories of the carnage, but they make it sound as if she hadn’t been terrified she wouldn’t live through it, would never see her twenty third year, gunfire and smoke, ash and rust, death.

 

      She survives, but what does that really even mean?

 

      For days after she will stare into the mirror, wondering who it was that stared back - orphan, war hero, soldier.

 

            (Human?)

 

      (For days after Cerberus brings her back, she'll trace the scars of skin grafts not quite healed and the low shine of cybernetics beneath and through the cracks in her skin and wonders the same thing.)

 

===

 

      What defined a human?

 

      (The aliens call _them_ aliens.)

 

      (Cerberus was human too.)

 

===

 

      (In one life, it is not Elysium that defines her, but Akuze. What would she have been like, going down that path?

 

      Both were their own horrors - just because she was hailed a hero in one, it didn’t mean she was excluded from the nightmare of the other. More names added to the list of those she is unable to save, protect. They don’t mention the dead when they speak of how she saved Elysium; it does not mean she didn’t lose them.)

 

===

 

      They want to make her a Spectre in the same way they wanted to make her the hero of the Blitz.

 

      (She doesn’t really _want_ but they want to _give_ and tell her it’s for the good of humanity - a human almost single-handedly fending off an entire fleet of batarian pirates, and the first human Spectre. She is a trophy. She is a soldier. She swallows her indignation and holds her head up with pride she does not feel. _Yes sir, aye aye sir, you say jump and I say how high_.)

 

      (She has learned how to say things they want to hear. It's a waste of breath otherwise. The words she wants to say scrape her throat raw and she'll disinfect the wounds of her internal struggle with whiskey.)

 

      She doesn’t care for the Council and they way they look down on their noses at them because they’re human and young and, as far as they’re concerned, underdeveloped. She doesn’t want to have to report to _them_. She hates politicians and reporters on principle; she is neither. Some days she doesn't know what she is. 

 

      (But no, she doesn’t punch the reporter in the face for the insensitive questions. Grits her teeth. Bears it. _Tell them what they want to hear_.)

 

            (For the good of humanity.)

 

===

 

      She has no idea what she’s getting into.

 

===

 

      The lives of entire species in her hands, all of them stuffed into her small, calloused palms until they’re overflowing. She can’t hold them all, can’t keep it all together.

 

      (She can barely save her own people with these two hands, remembers Ash’s voice over the comm as she sentenced her friend to death. Wonders, how many more of her friends will she lose?)

 

            (In another life, in several others, she loses them all, mourns them all, dies for them all.)

 

      The weight of each death is added to the responsibilities she carries with her at all times, one more life she couldn't save.

 

      _(Some hero you turned out to be.)_

 

===

 

      She dies.

 

      She comes back.

 

      She wishes she hadn’t, wishes Cerberus left her well enough _alone_ , left her to die at twenty nine, but now she’s twenty nine and chronologically thirty one and had she not done enough already?

 

      The Reapers are coming, she said, Saren dead and Sovereign solid proof, and they dismissed her claims while owing their lives to her, setting her on a geth patrol path that kills her. _The Reapers are coming_ , she stressed, and they had wasted no time in tearing apart her warning after they’d announced her dead. And then the Reapers came and they had all looked at her as if they had been expecting a miracle, as if she would be able to save all of them when they had decided they would not lift a single finger for her. They look to her to unite turian and salarian and krogan, geth and quarian.

 

      _What do we do now?_ They ask her, as if they hadn't heard her at all the past year. Why had she come back? She had done more on her own than with the backing of the Alliance. 

 

      She swallows her screams behind a locked jaw and bends her head over the datapads filled with the numbers of the dead, the dying, the lost, desperately racing against time they do not have, time she had gained for them, time they had squandered trying to prove her wrong. 

 

      (Death was easy - she’s thirty two and freshly recommissioned for duty and she watches a Reaper cut down a shuttle she had seen a boy climb on not seconds before while she escapes, unscathed, on the SR-2. Anderson will tell her that she left because she had been given a duty no one else could accomplish. It doesn’t stop her from watching the child burn in her dreams.)

 

      Joker’s voice wavers sometimes and she knows he’s remembering being the last one to see her alive before the SR-1 shattered and burned and arched through space to be half-buried on Alchera. She thinks of Alchera and she thinks of being on her knees, frozen fingers sifting through snow and ash for the dull glint of metal imprinted with names of people she had never had the chance to get to know, images of their original Normandy flashing through her mind’s eye. She mourns for them. She mourns for herself. The dead. The dying. The living and lost.

 

      (She can barely understand the gibberish of the corrupted coding on the datapad she finds in the wreckage of the CIC but when she does she mourns for Pressley too.)

 

===

 

      Cerberus brings her back but they can’t heal the scars on her skin, in her memory, beneath the flesh.

 

      Try to do the right thing. Watch them fade, but not enough.

 

      She’s still too much a rebel for that.

 

      ( _I see you’re thinking positive,_ Doctor Chakwas’s cool, dry hands tilting her face towards the light. Smiling vaguely, looking at a spot over her shoulder and trying not to think of suffocation in the mind-numbing chill of zero-grav void, the lives depending on her success, the lives lost if she fails, doesn’t say _I try, doc._ )

 

===

 

      Had anyone mourned for her when she died?

 

      She wants to think so, but doesn’t want to delude herself. She never had family to speak of, barely had time for a social life outside her Alliance career. She doesn’t see, so focused on Saren and Sovereign, on _proving_ herself - she doesn’t see until Kaidan and Horizon - _losing you was like losing a limb_ \- and then she does. The little ways they tiptoe around her as if making sure she's really there, Normandy solid under their feet, that this was not a shared fever dream after two years of agony. It hits her in full force the lives she touched, the fingerprints she left, leaves her breathless and chest tight. Could she do this to them again?

 

      (Kaidan walks away.

 

      She doesn’t blame him - is not surprised.)

 

 _He_ surprises her when he comes back, some three hundred and sixty odd days late, but it is welcome all the same.

 

      (There is no one else that can mourn Ash with her the way he knew - knows - how. Selfishly asking him to mourn the both of them again.)

 

===

 

      At the end of the world she stands on the battlefield of home, breathes in ash, remembers the fallen and those still standing. She, who stood between civilians and a fleet of pirates, humanity and sentient metal gods, and those who believed in her enough to stand with her; the tentative turian-salarian-krogan alliance, a quarian friend-turned-admiral-still-friend and an evolved geth wearing a part of her old armor as if a badge of honor side by side, a drell assassin, an asari warrior forced to kill her daughter and a daughter who lost her mother to the Reapers, human and ex-Cerberus, _rachni_.

 

      The Reaper looms like a menace.

 

      She’s never been scared of impossible odds.

 

      (Hands reaching out, trying to hold on, heart pounding, scars aching; _no matter what happens, I’ll always love you_. Turning away.

 

            This is her light at the end of the tunnel, until it isn’t.)

 

===

 

 _(Stop. Assess the situation._ _Think about the consequences.)_

 

      Outside the viewport, silent explosions rock the void of the space around Earth, orange, yellow, red flickering over the ever present blue.

 

      She used to love blue.

 

 _(Breathe deep, even if it’s crippling pain, sway on unsteady feet. Think about all the people that have been lost to the Collectors, to the Reapers, to the war, to the cycle. Think about all the people that had to be sacrificed for you to stand there. Remember their faces. Remember their fates._ )

 

      There is someone waiting for her to come home.

 

_(Don’t think about what they look like against the backdrop of space, or curled up on the bed, or the gunmetal gray of the Normandy. Don’t think about their smile, the way their fingers fit, their lingering smell in the cabin, the promise to make it back safe. Sorry, not this time.)_

 

      She’s already given so much. Can she give more? She’s tired. The end is just beyond the corner. The end is just ahead. All she has to do is move.

 

 _(Choose_.)

 

            She closes her eyes, and takes a step forward.

 

===

 

_Tell me more about the Shepard._


End file.
